FSFE Yearly Report 2017

Pubblicato il: 2017-12-07

The yearly report of the Free Software Foundation Europe gives you a breakdown
in one document of important things we have done and achieved during the last 12
months. Read on to find out about our activities, the campaigns we have run, the
events we have visited or organised, the groups we have helped, and what
resources we counted on to do it.

What we have done in 2017

Public Money, Public Code

In September, we launched our Public Money, Public Code campaign. The idea is
simple: Software created using taxpayers' money should be available under a free
licence for everybody.

To drive our campaign, we have set up a
campaign siteand published an open letter that everyone can sign to support
our demand. To boost virality and help everyone understand the benefits of
public bodies publishing their source code under free licences, we made a video
(Webpage /
Download /
Vimeo / YouTube)
explaining the situation. So far it is available in
English,
German and
French, with more languages to come.

This campaign is ongoing and still in its early stages. In fact, we intend to
continue it well into 2019 at least, so as to raise awareness among candidates
for the elections to the European Parliament. At the moment of writing, we have
collected over 14,000
signatures of our open
letter. Among the signatories are national
representatives and European Parliament Members, and we have received
endorsements from over 100
organisations and prominent players in the IT field, including security
expert Edward Snowden.

Our goal is to get elected officials to commit to policy and legislations that
make publicly funded software free software by default. To that effect, we
contacted ~1000 candidates for the German Federal Parliament elections and asked
the addressees to "implement legislation requiring that publicly financed
software developed for public sector [...] be made publicly available under a
Free and Open Source Software licence." from the candidates who contacted us that they support our claim, 19 are now members of parliament. Beside that the whole parliamentary group of the
German Green
party responded
to our campaign in a public letter, stating their support for our demand.

Save Code Share

A new copyright proposal is currently being discussed by the EU
co-legislators. Part of this proposal is Article 13, an item that will hamper our
ability to collaborate with each other online. Article 13 mandates that all
online hosting service providers must install an upload filter that blocks any
works from being uploaded that may constitute a copyright violation and must monitor
their users as well as actively seek possible copyright infringements. These
fundamentally flawed filtering algorithms will ultimately decide what code
developers should be allowed to share. Beside all the problems upload
filters come with, there are no known filtering technologies that could accurately and
reliably identify whether Free Software code is being shared in accordance with
its terms and conditions.

To combat this legislation, we launched a website
to Save Code Share in collaboration with
Open Forum Europe. We aim to raise awareness of the topic and work to change the
proposed legislation. We published
a white
paper to explain Article 13's impact on free software developers and
communities, and an Open Letter that has already been
signed by more than 6000 individuals, organisations and companies.

While the European Parliament prepares to vote on its main negotiating
position regarding the EU copyright directive proposal in the beginning of 2018,
several parliamentary committees have already issued their opinions on Article
13. Together with Open Forum Europe, we put pressure on the vote in Civil
Liberties Committee that rejected the use of upload filters when it comes to
hosting works online. Now, we have to make sure that the main parliamentary
effort takes our concerns into consideration, and rejects Article 13 from its
negotiating position with the co-legislators in the EU Council.

The website hosts a video (Webpage /
Download /
Vimeo) that explains the three simple
steps involved in making a project REUSE compliant. Developers will also find
extra resources. To demonstrate the ease of
making a project compliant in practice, we host a number of
repositories] that are REUSE compliant.

Furthermore, the FSFE is writing and
providing a tool that will help
developers make their software REUSE compliant. The goal is to
package the tool into the repositories of the most popular GNU/Linux
distributions, so that the barriers for adoption are as low as possible.

Do you like what we are doing? Then become a supporter and help us to make a difference in 2018!

10th Legal and Licensing Workshop

Free Software licences are just as important as free code. The Free
Software movement would not survive without the legal documents that allow and
enforce software to be freely shared and modified. The Legal and Licensing
Workshop (LLW) is probably the most important Free Software event you have never
heard of. It is aimed at the niche made up by legal experts and professionals
that work with the legal system supporting Free Software.

In 2017 we held the
workshop's 10th edition in Barcelona. For us this is a landmark because we
have managed to get the top legal experts from a wide variety of communities,
public institutions and industries travel from all over the world to come
together in an event like no other in the Free Software sector. This year's LLW
compliance track was all about the tools used to enforce licences and how
companies can support them.

Free Software in public administrations was another important topic discussed
during the event. The aim was to discover ways of how public administrations
could be more transparent and more responsible with the funds when financing the
development of software. The ideas legal professionals walked away with will
deeply affect society as a whole.

Fiduciary Licence Agreement 2.0

The FSFE acknowledges that the licensing of code has been well served by Free
Software licences, but managing rights and content within a project over long
periods of time is still a complex issue. To fix this, the FSFE has drafted the
Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA), a well-balanced contributor agreement which
gives the trustee, responsible for managing the rights within a Free Software
project, power and responsibility to make sure the contributed software always
remains free and open. This ensures that the project, together with all the respective
contributors, are protected against any misuse of power by a new copyright
holder.

We have joined forces with ContributorAgreements.org
and integrated the FLA-2.0 into its Copyright Licensing Agreement (CLA)
chooser/generator. This makes the use of the FLA easier both for projects
and for developers

European Free Software Policy Meeting

Apart from travelling with our booth to the community's favourite event, the
day before the opening of FOSDEM, we hosted the second European Free Software
Policy Meeting. We met with Sebastian Raible, parliamentary assistant to Julia
Reda, MP of the EU for the German Pirate party; Pierre Damas, Head of Sector,
Digital Services at the Directorate General of Information Technologies of the
European Commission; Jaana Sahk-Labi from the Estonian Permanent Representation
to the EU; Laurent Joubert from the French government; and members of other Free
Software advocating organisations.

Together we discussed the progress of the Free and Open Source Software Audit
(or FOSSA) programme, some of the Commission's plans for updating its Open
Source Software Strategy, and national projects to promote Free Software in
public administration and businesses.

Ask your candidates

The FSFE's community participated in the political campaigns during the Dutch
general elections, the state of North-Rhine Westphalia as well as the German
federal elections.

Our team from the Netherlands developed freedomvote.nl to give voters
orientation on internet policies and Free Software. A similar tool was developed
by the FSFE together with a "Free Knowledge Coalition" for the German
federal elections;
the "Digital-o-Mat". This tool made it into the news of multiple national media agencies as well as
the public television and attracted tens of thousands of visitors to inform
themselves about internet policy topics and Free Software.We also asked political parties
in the German elections about their position on Free Software in our
"Ask your candidates" campaign-framework.

Do you like what we are doing? Then become a supporter and help us to make a difference in 2018!

New git hosting service: git.fsfe.org

Sharing knowledge and collaboration are two of the core principle in the Free Software society. To encourage both, This
year, the FSFE opened
a Git hosting service for our supporters with Gitea as a web
interface.

By visiting git.fsfe.org, you can share
and collaborate on a platform that fully respects your freedoms. Using the
graphical web interface, you can open issue reports for bugs or feature
requests. git.fsfe.org can host individual projects; complex multi-project
repositories for organisations, or act as a mirror for another Git repository
hosted elsewhere, like on GitHub or GitLab.

LiMux: A Lighthouse goes Dark

This year Munich's new mayor, Dieter Reiter, a self-confessed "fan of
Microsoft", went out of his way to undermine the work carried out by the
administration to migrate away from their proprietary IT framework and pushed
for a return to proprietary software on all levels. The FSFE president Matthias
Kirschner explained the background to this decision in several talks, for
example at
the openSUSE Conference 2017 in May, with the intent of spreading insight
and awareness to other organisations and Free Software advocates.

Along with The Document Foundation, KDE, and OSBA, we campaigned to keep
Free Software in the city of Munich. We reached out to all members of the city
council prior to the public hearing and we sent a call for action to our German
speaking supporters, asking them to get in contact with politicians. The
reaction was phenomenal. During the public hearing, politicians quoted some of
our questions, and said that they had never received as much input from citizens
and the press before. Unfortunately, all this public pressure did not alter their decision to transition away from LiMux, Microsoft Exchange had been phased in during the talks, and the decision to switch back to proprietary software has been taken.

Taking the "Public Money? Public Code!" campaign out onto the streets of Berlin.

Do you like what we are doing? Then become a supporter and help us to make a difference in 2018!

FSFE's 2017 in numbers

Having precise data will help you visualise what resources we use to carry
out our activities. With that in mind, the next section reduces FSFE's 2017 to
figures and numbers. (As a sidenote: A lot of the data in this section, for
example the number from our budget, refers to 2016 because it only became
available when 2016 was over, that is, in 2017.)

Booth, events and PR

The FSFE has attended no less than
75 events in the last twelve months. The events we attended were of all
sizes, from meetups organised by local Free Software groups, to big fairs set up
by public institutions and industries, to outdoor non-profit camps. Many take
our representatives all over Europe and, in the last year, the FSFE has attended
events in 11 countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy,
France, Spain, Albania, Austria, Sweden, Portugal, Belgium, Greece and the
USA. Apart from speaking and listening to others speak, we also set up our booth
at 15 venues.

The FSFE village during SHA Camp 2017 in the Netherlands.

At our booth you can also get stickers, flyers and balloons. These promote
Free Software, warn about clouds, advise on using free formats, and so on. In
fact, you don't have to visit our booth to get your hands on these goodies: you
can ask us yourself for a boxful
for your own event at
no cost. In the last 12 months we have sent out 233 boxes for the
recipient. Since we are talking about rather big boxes, this amounts to
literally thousands of stickers, flyers and other goodies.

Budget

In 2017 we got the final data for the 2016 budget and can reveal now that,
over the last four
years, FSFE's income came to
between 350,000 and 450,000 euros, but in 2016 the amount went up to
nearly 650,000 euros, which
was a nice surprise. That is over a 45% increase with regard to 2015. Most of
the growth can be attributed to extraordinary donations from our generous
sponsors (up by over 83%), including an inheritance from a person who wants to
stay anonymous, but the supporters contributions have also increased and have
done so every year, not even flagging in the worst of the economic crisis.

That said, at the FSFE we try to be as a frugal as possible and, although
costs went up a bit in 2016, the increase didn't reach 9% with regard to
2015. The biggest costs in 2016 were in our efforts to increase public
awareness, where we spent 142,965 euros; our basic infrastructure costs that includes among other things
our personell and office costs for management and administration where we spent 130,082 euros and our legal
work where we spent 117,336 euros.

FSFE's costs in recent years.

FSFE's revenues in recent years.

Proportionally, the biggest growth in costs happened in the Merchandising
department, which grew 16%, from 32,142 euros in 2015 to 37,464 euros in
2016. This is in line with the amount of merchandising we gave and sold to our
friends and followers, which increased by 13% from 2015. This is good news,
since, as our main aim for merchandising is to spread our message as far and
wide as possible, this shows that year after year, the number of people that are
made aware of our campaigns and activities grows.

The people behind FSFE

Beyond events and numbers, FSFE is about the people that make up our
community. In this sections we would like to introduce you to our comunity and
some of our members that too often don't get all the credit they deserve.

Attendees of FSFE community meeting 2017.

Do you like what we are doing? Then become a supporter and help us to make a difference in 2018!

Our community

There are 5 full time employees at the FSFE: Ulrike Sliwinski is our Office
Manager and the person you are most likely to talk to if your phone our office;
Polina Malaja is the coordinator of the legal team and our Policy
Analyst; Erik Albers is our communications and community coordinator; Jonas
Öberg is the FSFE's executive director; and, finally, there's Matthias Kirschner
who is the president. We also employ 1 part-time employee: Max Mehl, who is our
program manager and deputy coordinator of translations. This team is joined
by interns for three or more
months to work on specific projects and help out in general as well as
occasional contractors for specific tasks. This year our interns have been: Olga
Gkotsopoulou, Fernando Sanjurjo, Erik da Silva, Jonke Suhr, Carmen Bianca Bakker
and Kristi Progri.

The Executive Council is
the body that actually executes the wishes of the members. Currently, there are
4 members in the Council: Matthias Kirschner (President), Jonas Öberg (Executive
Director), Patrick Ohnewein (Financial Officer) and Heiki Lõhmus (Vice President
and Translations Coordinator).

The FSFE's formal
members are responsible for planning, budgeting, setting the agenda and
electing and recalling of the Executive Council and the Financial
Officer. During 2017, we counted on 28 members, including the the 2 prior
presidents, Georg Greve and Karsten Gerloff, and the 4 members of the Executive
Council.

Then we have our European
Core Team, consisting of the formal members plus another 15 individuals from
all over Europe, and they are the people that carry out the day-to-day tasks of
the organisation on a voluntary or paid basis on core issues and coordinate the
many volunteers that support Free Software.

Finally we have the all important supporters. Supporters are sympathisers
that have decided to officially support the FSFE
by joining our supporter program. During
2017 we surpassed the 1,600 mark and now have supporters in more than 40
countries around the world, including most European countries as well as the
Unites States and Australia.

Introducing some of our individuals

Reinhard Müller

Reinhard is from Lustenau, Vorarlberg, in Austria and has been part of the
FSFE for over more than 10 years. Reinhard has always carried out anonymous,
often ungrateful tasks that don't get much visibility, but, without which, the
FSFE would grind to a halt.

He started out maintaining the FSFE's website, coordinating the translation
team and taking care of the Fellowship database. Then, from 2007 to 2017, he
took over the financial side as FSFE's official Financial Officer. In that role,
Reinhard has done everything related to managing the Foundation's money, from
okaying invoices, to filing out our taxes.

However, that hasn't made Reinhard an antisocial hermit, always poring over
dusty books with ink-stained fingers. Quite the contrary: if there is something
Reinhard enjoys more than columns and columns of figures it is direct contact
with people at events. Reinhard loves participating in fairs and tradeshows at
the FSFE booth. Next time you are at Linuxtage or FOSDEM, be sure to come by and
say hello. You may get lucky and witness Reinhard's legendary T-shirt folding
capabilities in action and live. Something worth beholding.

Ulrike Sliwinski

But, talking of booth service and merchandise, if there is one person you can
always rely on to get you sweaters and stickers, that is Ulrike. Ulrike joined
the FSFE as an office assistant in 2014 on part-time contract. When we realised
how much she brought to the job, we quickly asked her to become our full time
office manager.

Ulrike, as Reinhard, carries out tasks that are largely invisible to the
outside world, but without which the FSFE simply wouldn't be able to run. If you
phone the FSFE up for any reason, it will probably be Ulrike who solves your
problem. If you ask for one of our boxes of stickers and flyers for you event,
it is Ulrike who packs it and sends it off.

Ulrike has been described by some of her colleagues as the
"personification of German efficiency" and as someone who will not
leave a task alone until it is completed to her entire satisfaction. But Ulrike
is also kind, helpful and friendly, making her the perfect host for our office
and booth.

André Ockers

One of the FSFE's main missions is to raise awareness among the general
public, in companies, in the public sector, and among politicians. Stating the
obvious, the first step towards effectively raising awareness, is putting out
your messages in the language of your target audience.

That is where people like André come
in. André translates
most, if not all, FSFE's output into Dutch, and he does so unprompted. André
translated more than 80% of FSFE's site into Dutch, and you can expect him to
have a translation of every news item or press release we put out within eight
hours.

André represents all of those selfless heroes that year in and year out help
us reach people of all countries in their native languages.

At the end

We like to send a big big thank you out to our community, all the countless volunteers, supporters and donors who who made the work of FSFE possible in 2017. Your contributions are priceless and we do our best to keep the good work going in 2018.